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Abstract
The degree of spatial segregation and concentration of minority ethnic groups in European cities is well documented. However, little is known about the residential mobility between neighbourhoods that brings about changes in the patterns of ethnic segregation. In this paper we analyse the residential mobility of minority ethnic groups from an assimilation perspective, according to which moving out of ethnic into predominantly white neighbourhoods can be seen as an indicator of immigrants’ incorporation into mainstream society. Residential mobility into white neighbourhoods is therefore expected to be a function of socio-economic mobility and acculturation at the individual level. The prospect for the long term is that differences in residential mobility behaviour based on ethnic status should gradually disappear. However, in our comparison between the biggest minority ethnic groups in the Netherlands and the native majority, we find only partial confirmation for the assimilation perspective.
Notes
1. Of course, the choice to define a concentration neighbourhood as an area where the share of minority-group residents is at least 40 per cent is somewhat arbitrary. Therefore, we also used two other dividing lines (35 and 45 per cent) to distinguish between concentration neighbourhoods and other neighbourhoods. However, the different dividing lines did not yield noticeably different regression models than those in this paper.
2. The demarcation of concentration neighbourhoods is based on the share of minority-group residents before the time-span for which we analysed the residential mobility. Therefore, the definition of concentration neighbourhood is not affected by the moves of ethnic minorities and native Dutch during the period of analysis.
3. Since there was a difference in measurement between HDS 2002 and HRN 2006, household income was standardised to make the income data of both surveys comparable.
4. Racial harassment might also be a contextual factor that affects minority households’ mobility decisions. Although there is more attention paid in the Dutch literature to the role of racial hostility since 9/11 (Permentier and Bolt Citation2006; van der Zwaard Citation2005), there is no information about the regional variation in the fear of harassment.
5. Tables and are also published in another paper (Bolt et al. Citation2008), in which the outcomes are explained in a much more condensed way.
6. In the last columns of and it is shown whether the differences between the ethnic-specific coefficients are significant. For each explanatory variable we tested this difference for significance by running the multinomial regression models presented in and , but with the inclusion of an interaction effect of ethnic group with the explanatory variable.